Friday Four: Velocity Wrap-Up Edition

What a week. Velocity was absolutely amazing. If you weren’t able to attend, definitely consider it for next year. Lots of great takeaways and food for thought, which I’ll be posting about in the weeks to come.

Till then, here are the four most popular links (according to Topsy) mentioned on Twitter with the “velocityconf” hashtag over the past few days:

Tim O’Reilly’s Keynote
The crowd, not surprisingly, loves Tim, and for good reason. In his keynote, he reminds us of Velocity co-chair Jesse Robbins’ inspiring words, “The web is changing the way we live and touches every person alive. As more and more people depend on the web, they depend on us. Web Operations is work that matters.”

Steve Souders: Zen and the Art of Web Performance
I’m kind of proud of this little meme. After Tim referred to Steve’s blog post, Strangeloop found the link and posted it on Twitter. It went mini-viral and got retweeted like crazy. For good reason. Those before-and-after photos of Steve’s retaining wall are pretty compelling.

Psychology of Performance
One of the most talked about sessions at Velocity was Stoyan Stefanov’s presentation on the human factors surrounding perceived and actual speed. Interesting fact: People perceive sites with white backgrounds to be faster, which is good, but they also have higher performance expectations of white sites. (Guess what color the newly launched Strangeloop site is?)